


in the chinese room

by Cahoots



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Androids, M/M, android!alpha dave, stridercestweek
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-17
Updated: 2017-01-17
Packaged: 2018-09-17 20:04:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9341099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cahoots/pseuds/Cahoots
Summary: Maybe it catches your eye now because you recognise it from experience – the familiarity denotes no mistaking it. It’s a captchalogued brain in a jar, and it looks like unstirred ramen.





	

**Author's Note:**

> i went to write rarepair brohal for stridercest week but all i got was this stupid au (in my drafts since forever) (technically counts for day 2's prompt as its sorta inspired by that Goodnight Moon fic can u tell) (i hope its good i cant tell anymore) (S/O to my pal rt for the working title !!tysm smart cookie)

You see it first in TMZ reel no. 65 on the 17th re-watch after setting a haul of blue marlins out to dry on the roof. It’s not a predominantly notable selection of episodes, but it serves as a way to fill the room with voices and funny accents that you sometimes can’t cognitively accept as real and the rest provides reassuring name drops of the big guy himself. You’d marked each mention with chapter titles to make them easier to find after how many times you’ve watched them through, and it’s a regular occurrence that you flip through them until you find something you feel like re-watching.  
  
This one is the episode where your brother’s talking face gets the steadiest close ups – to a general consensus of appreciation (Cal in your lap, Squarewave sparking at your side) – because it was an interview for the Entertainment Gazette. The TMZ crew only utilize around twenty seconds of it to half-assedly pick apart, but it’s enough for you to see what you need.  
  
The set looks like he constructed it himself, skirting the fine line between pretentious and don't give a shit: just a swivel chair, a luxurious-looking bookshelf behind him and a half-sized, pixelated movie poster taped up on a music stand. The rest is dark empty studio and dramatic lighting. It looks like he’s surrounded by the void. The bookshelf’s stocked with books and useless bric-a-brac, and of all the titles you can make out, you’ve read. He actually channels Beckett in the full interview, but more subtle and convoluted and deliberately pointless. For now you’re less interested in the dialogue, and more interested in the third shelf.  
  
Maybe it catches your eye now because you recognise it from experience – the familiarity denotes no mistaking it. It’s a captchalogued brain in a jar, and it looks like unstirred ramen.

  
You don’t let it go. Letting go is not a thing that you do.

  
You manage to find the full interview and then the time and location from browsing through the videography and email archives, and AR helps you dig out the blueprints and the make of the bookshelf to find the exact coordinates. It’s a loose estimate, takes three days of work, and the variables are extensive, but somehow, you do it.

  
It’s so fucking satisfying watching the tape over and over again, just to see that jar blink out of existence. No one even notices. You wonder what your brother made of it afterwards.  
  
  
The programming takes over a month, thanks to your unwillingness to ask Ro-lal for help, but less than two thanks to your prior experience. You don’t even test run it before you get started on the chassis, to make up for time lost.  
  
Building the body takes even longer. Technically, it should be easier, a breeze even, but you’re such a goddamn perfectionist that you won’t even let yourself just use up the parts at hand; you go diving whenever the weather’s clear with a hacksaw and a fishing net and floaties, cut up road signs, billboards and waterlogged plumbing, even raid the submerged hospital that you’d never dared to enter before.  
  
The first time you go to implant the program and boot it up, AR inhibits you by talking to you for hours, finally breaking his silence on how much could go wrong in dramatic, last-minute soap operas. It’s two in the morning when you reach a stalemate, your frustration and tiredness winning over his reservations. He’s you after all. He wants this just as much, even if it doesn’t work right. Even if it hurts.  
  
You click the feed into the neck and upload. The eyes flicker on for half a second, then die.

  
It aches like the most hellacious itch to go back to the programming, like static in your brain trying to shake your tear-ducts and blur your vision. You let AR have freer reign this time, but you’re pushing to get it done sooner, and so you make desperate mistakes alongside him, stupid ones, and you have to go back several times. You don’t know why it wasn’t this difficult for your own consciousness. Maybe because your brain was younger? Maybe because it didn't matter as much.  
  
When the eyes light up, and stay lit up, you haven’t slept for four consecutive days. Your hair is flat, pushed back with a hairband, and only the edge of the bed is what’s keeping you propped up. You haven’t talked to your friends for a while, but you guess AR has been taking care of that. You assume they’re all pretty mad at you. You don’t care.

   
  
…

 

 There’s a buzzing…no. Static? And it’s loud, man, like you’re suddenly some kind of portable tv set with the volume cranked up to max in Bear Grylls’s secret campervan, and he’s busy preparing another steaming pint of piss to drink in the middle of the desert in lieu of switching you off. Huh. Why were you the tv in this metaphor.  
  
“Da-e? Respond-t-t-”  
  
The sound is crackly through the static, but you can make it out, you just haven’t registered what it means. You feel floaty and irritated, like you’re in dream that just won’t quit with the whole amplified input interference from all goddamn angles thing,  and that’s not even addressing the fact that your vision’s also on the blinker. Oh. You haven’t been seeing anything at all.  
  
Is this dream paralysis? You haven’t felt your limbs either and for a second it’s suffocating, but then you’re detached, floaty, switching between something too far away and then all too much. You’re just. You don’t know what this. Through your panicky mess something makes an executive decision to reign it in, take it one step at a time, maybe, you want…you want to twitch a finger..-  
  
Understanding floods in fast as the base-data finally kicks in - a sharp, white-hot pain that your mind locks onto immediately; the only clarity in a wave of jumbled numbers that wants to give you the time of day as it sears through your wannabe nerve-endings and your limbs, burning shocks as it re-establishes your body and your autonomous functions and how far down your toes are and gravity swings you nauseatingly. Newton's law is crushing you, mattress too heavy at your back and head like smacking into the pavement from twenty storeys. Finally you know how to move your mouth and the first thing you use it for is a gasp through the hurt, christening your most VIP asset by emerging for air you don’t need.  
  
The pain eventually recedes zero point excessive zeroes two seconds later when the relief of _feeling_ and comprehension combine to wash over you hot and cold and drag you through to the other side - pain still there, just squirreled away from the frontal function - your eyes open.  
  
There's a face in your face, and your hearing coughs itself into jarring silence.

Shit, Houston, auto-pilot is a success.

  
Your vision is crystal. HHHD quality. You could even count the folds in his irises, every single bit of amber.  
  
He swallows, then pressure on your shoulder. Fingers dig in. Maybe you should count the red tracks in the whites instead, could you calculate how much sleep a dude's missing?  
  
“Respond, Dave." A voice crack. "You’re looking right at me, c’mon.”  
  
You blink out of habit and drop your gaze to his nose. Shape looks familiar and you force your breath not to catch. Words. Speaking. Right.  
  
“...’Sup.”  
  
The mattress shifts as Dirk slips off it and some air escapes him in a rush. There's a dull thud when his ass hits the floor.  
  
"That's good, that sounds good, good start," he mutters to himself, and you try to twitch a finger again (even though you're a teensy bit scared to move) because better late than never right and okay, ow, bad emotion crock pot to accidentally reference right now but your finger twitches up and it feels fine. You're sorta reeling.  
  
Around you is a room that you both know and don't know, and it's bathed in late afternoon light from the single window. From this angle you can see the overhead fan in the ceiling, every item on the desk, twenty three knuts, fifteen bolts, sixteen tiny LED lights, an open CD case, screwdriver, welding stick, five big scraps of latex, fifty two tiny scraps of latex, a nubbed pencil, old office lamp, thirty eight whorls in the desk's grain, seven posters, the overcompensatingly large TV screen you won in a raffle and a sock.  
  
You've taken this all in in zero point excessive zeroes five seconds. Dirk drags himself back up to sit on the bed in six.  
  
"This is...a little...insane," you manage to get out, carefully, buzzily. Dirk'd probably startle if he wasn't so exhausted; instead he's staring.  
"Back in my day," you feel your mouth twitch up, it's weird knowing it's not your real one, you stop it. You don't even know what you look like, your smile could be deadly in this form, better put a leash on that thing. "Kids…built lego bots and water…guns, not full…y func..tion…ing androids."  
  
He's still staring.  
  
"I've already built three."  
  
Oh.  
  
"The fourth one I built the parts, and gave instructions to put it together."  
  
You're staring now, but shit, you think you've well earned that right, and you want to burn the knowledge of what his face looks like into your robo brain. He swallows.  
  
"You're the one who…" He shakes it off. "Okay, I need to diagnostic check you." He gets to his feet, your eyes dim.  
  
You think your eyes should be burning at this point, as you watch him hasten around out the corner of your eye, tapping at a keyboard just out of sight, picking some stuff up off the floor. You could turn your head to see, but you think you'd... robo-throw up? Chuck up pixels or some shit.

The distant sound of waves crashing makes you take in another unnecessary, tinny breath, and the world seems to widen a little. Is that the real sea? Can't be. Must be another electronic device you can't pinpoint playing somewhere, you know you'd need something to aide you in chilling out right about now, maybe you're imagining it to give you an excuse for feeling the waterworks, can an artificial you fool your artificial self like that, fuck…yeah, ultimately you know it's real just from the sound of it, but. Still. You can't prove it 'till you look out the window (which you're not even close to) of which you need to get up to do (and is not happening any time soon) and your voice box skitters at fingers brushing your own.  
  
The bed dips again and for a moment your eyes dim at the change in pressure against your head, before the pain is snatched under wraps again, squirreled back into insignificance.  
  
"Okay, uh. Give me your hand."  
  
As patiently as he sits, you continue to not move. 'Cept your eyes, you guess. Your vision cameras are the most mobile. Catching all them sweet moves.  
  
"It's not. Technically. The real...mvp dropped outta commission a while. Back. It's...in no man's hand. Land."  
  
"Your...okay. Your new hand, then. I just need to check you out."  
  
"For what...shit jokes?"  
  
"No, just a general run down of all your motor functions, see if they're moving fine or if I've messed up and something's loose somewhere." His index curls in your palm. "That was a shit joke, though."  
  
"It's my normal," you assure him. You lock onto the curved line his mouth makes as the corners twitch up.  
  
"That's not what I've heard," he debates.  
  
"You've...been fed lies."  
  
A puff of a laugh, hard to tell if amusement or self-deprecating. There's a shine to his eyes, wet. "By you?" He's coming close again, casting a sleepy eye over your body, straining to concentrate properly. He's blinking too much, a work weary hand light on your wrist.  
  
"Hey, I just put what I have out there." Your voice seems to be coming easier now. "Once that baby's crawling free it's out of my hands and up to public inter..pretation."  
  
"Why don't you move your hands?"  
  
"I don't want to."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"Because they ain't mine and frankly the idea of something else performing my duties that belong to yours truly and should be done by yours truly is blasphemous."  
  
He thinks on this, and frowns, looking lost. His face is very expressive, huh.  
  
"...Check me in the morning." You meet his eyes.  
  
"It's six. You're...you're on my bed."  
  
"There's space." Is there? You can only tell by the angle of the wall-meets-ceiling, if the bed is pushed up flush against the wall. Should be a double, how wide is that, can you calculate if that's right, Dirk is already climbing over you with minimal jostling, knee brushing yours and spare screws tinkle as he brushes them to the foot of the bed.  
  
"The light," you buzz softly. He scrambles up to flick a switch on the wall, before sinking down beside you, leaving the room to bathe in soft twilight and blue from his monitor, no sharp shadows. Your voice box fuzzes as you exhale slowly into the silence. You feel him curl up, hear the sheets rustle, but you can only tell how close he is to touching you from his breath on your artificial skin. You'd feel it better if you still had hair, you think, but even so. That's a whole lot of nerve-endings. The exact number springs to your mind as an after-thought.  
  
"Tell me if...if you need..me.." Dirk mumbles into the cotton, one foot already in dreamland. Your eyes dim as you resign yourself to a long wait.


End file.
